Douglas Adams

Douglas Noel Adams (March 11, 1952 - May 11, 2001), was a British comic author, most notably the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - a twelve-"fit" (i.e. twelve-part) radio series first broadcast in the UK by BBC Radio 4 in 1978, and subsequently published (in heavily modified and extended form) in novel form as a "trilogy in five parts", and as a six-part BBC television series in 1981.

Douglas was educated at Brentwood School, Essex, where he met Griff Rhys Jones, one of the comedians involved in Not the Nine O'Clock News. Rhys Jones followed Adams to Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Early in his career, Douglas worked with Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame, and has a writing credit in one episode (second last?) of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Adams subsequently worked as a script editor of the BBC Television programme Doctor Who and wrote three serials for that series:

• "The Pirate Planet"
• "Shada"
• "City of Death"

Between 1978 and 1984, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd together wrote the script for two half hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles called "Dr Snuggles and the Nervous River".

Adam's was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for a sizable period of time to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was completed.

Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy together with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy (also by Infocom, but not based on any book). Adams was also responsible for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was published in 1999 by Simon and Schuster[?]. The accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, was written by Terry Jones, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the H2G2 collaborative writing project.

Adams died at 49 of a heart attack while working out at his gym in Santa Barbara. He was survived by his wife Jane and daughter Polly. In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, presumably as his last book, including many short stories, essays, letters, and eleven chapters of his unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was to be a new Dirk Gently novel. It also contains eulogies from Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry.

Plans to make The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy into a major motion picture have been in the works for more than twenty years and, as Adams put it, are in "development hell". Austin Powers director Jay Roach[?] has signed on to the project, and Adams reportedly had a script they were both happy with before his death, but the movie remains unmade. Douglas Adams once described the Hollywood process like "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people come into the room and breathe on it."

Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a number of endangered species. This activism culminated in the non-fiction work Last Chance to See[?].

Table of contents 1 Selected works 1.1 Novels in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series 1.2 The Dirk Gently series 1.3 Other works 2 External link

Selected works

Novels in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
• Life, the Universe, and Everything[?] (1982)
• So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish (1984)
• Mostly Harmless (1992)

The Dirk Gently series

• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
• The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988)

Other works

• The Meaning of Liff (1983, with John Lloyd)
• The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts (1985, with Geoffrey Perkins)
• The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book[?] (1986, edited by Douglas Adams)
• "Young Zaphod Plays it Safe[?]" (first published in The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book; a reworked version appeared in The Wizard of Odds and The Salmon of Doubt)
• The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990, with John Lloyd; extended version of The Meaning of Liff)
• Last Chance to See[?] (1991, with Mark Carwardine[?], non-fictional account of several trips to see endangered species; according to a piece in The Salmon of Doubt, this book gave Adams the most satisfaction, if not the highest sales)
• Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic[?] (written by Terry Jones, based on a computer game by Douglas Adams)
• The Salmon of Doubt (2002), unfinished novel manuscript (11 chapters), short stories, essays, and interviews

External link

• Douglas Adams' Official Website (http://www.douglasadams.com/)